Software licensing and support in the Cloud

"For the purpose of this discussion let us assume that cloud implies virtualisation."

I posted similar "questions" on other forums, unfortunately without much response.

For a moment lets ignore all the security issues and look at how software licensing and support agreements are impacted on by virtulisation and cloud deployments? I work in the Financial services arena and many software vendors do not officially or unofficially support and sanction the running of their software in virtualised environments.

They give many reasons for this. The main ones are unable to QA stability and performance under virtualised environments, underlying components not supported e.g. databases other software libraries etc,etc,etc. Bottom line it is going to cost them to much to support in the short term. But in the long term I think that they will loose customers.

I know there are performance considerations in virtualisation particularly with trading systems where often high data throughput and low latency systems are a prerequisite. I do however believe there are suitable solutions for this. People just need to think a little out of the box and put conventional wisdom aside.

I imagine that there are a fair number of people who face licensing and support issues around virtualisation, please share your thoughts and experiences by leaving a comment?

Update:

I have found these interesting and related links:

• Cloud Computing's Other Achilles' Heel: Software Licensing
• Clouds Looming for Software Server Vendors
• Is cloud computing a solution for software licensing woes?

What is desktop virtualisation?

I listened to a very interesting and informative presentation from Fraser Kyne of Citrix systems. It was a relatively vendor neutral overview of desktop virtualisation technology and how it is evolving. You can get it here, http://bit.ly/c5COCT.

Like most things in technology you seldom if any find a solution that's one size fits all (except for Python!), the same is true here. It you are in the middle of or intend kicking off a virtualisation project, I would suggest you take a listen to this.